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Praveen's Blog

Thursday Feb 26, 2009

Another important developer event that I attended recently was the SunTechDays' 2009 at Hyderabad. It's been a few years since I last visited the event and lot of things have changed since then for the better - the venue, the technologies, the organizers etc and the passion towards learning new stuff is always on the raise. I actually expected lesser no of people this time due to the economic downturn but the moment I entered the venue, I was proved wrong. In fact, I had to squeeze in to reach the JavaFX stall that I was manning. The convention center was flooded with professionals and students !! The venue (International Convention Center) is really one of the state-of-the-art infrastructure for such mega-events and on par with the Moscone center in SFO where JavaOne is held every year.

The center of attraction was of course 'Father-of-Java' - James Gosling, one of the most admired celebrities in the technology arena. The event started off with a musical bonanza where a 10 year old boy was playing Drums for 20 mins or so. The audience were captivated entirely by his performance and there was a pin-drop silence for few moments when he gave a break and people had to gather themselves to put their hands together. Only at that time, I realized that I have tears on my eyes since I had kept them open for so long. He looked as if he has 10+ limbs while playing the drums. He is indeed a child prodigy !!

KeyNote

KeyNotes started with some cool demos on JavaFX, Java TV and OpenSolaris and some of them actually triggered many 'WOW!'s. People were getting restless and eager to see James on the stage and finally when he arrived, there was a thundering applause. It's amazing to see the amount of excitement, respect and admiration that people show towards this man and of course, he deserves it for innovating a technology that touches people around the globe through every bit of device that they use.

JavaFX Stall

JavaFX clearly took the center stage at Sun Tech and all the JavaFX sessions were full-house. Right after every session, people stormed the JavaFX Stall asking multiple questions, watching demos and it was a challenge for me and my colleagues to streamline the people, given the limited space for the stall. Our neighboring stalls also felt the pinch due to this and at times, they asked when is the next JavaFX Session, just to get prepared. It would have been worth even If I had taken my entire team out there to handle the stall. But it clearly demonstrated the value and potential of this platform and the excitement that it's been creating in the developer community. Another thing that attracted people was the CodeJavaFX Contest(For Students and Professionals in India, please sign up for the CodeJavaFX Contest if you have not already done so. It's a great opportunity to unleash your creativity and showcase your talents and you get a chance to win Exciting prizes)from Sun for Professionals/Students in India to contribute cool RIAs written in JavaFX and we have been getting an overwhelming response. Overall, It was an exhaustive ordeal but very satisfying at the end.

My Session

Theme of my JavaFX Session was to take the audience through the development of A Rich Internet Application and demonstrating it on Desktop and Mobile. I and my Colleague Rakesh Menon were there at the Stage driving the session and we demonstrated the development of a Media Browser application that facilitates navigating through media and image contents obtained from the web through FX-WebServices. It was a code-walkthrough session and we were showing a demo after developing each module. This helped us keep the audience awake especially in a post-lunch session. Main objective of our session was to emphasize on rapid development of RIA and the ease with which it can be done using JavaFX with NetBeans. people seemed to have grasped that pretty well at the end of the session. There were lot of interesting questions from various modules in FX such as Langugage, Graphics, Scenegraph, Language, Media, Animation etc and some of these questions were really sharp to the extent of taking them offline accompanied by lengthy conversations.

I am back to blogging after a small gap (Blame the JavaFX Momentum) and I am here to share some of my good experiences from my recent university trips. I got a chance to visit a couple of techfests @ premier universities in india few weeks ago to conduct workshops on JavaFX technology. I should say I was simply amazed to see the amount of enthusiasm and excitement that this technology has created among the students.

The workshops were conducted at techfests organized by NIT, Trichy and SASTRA (near Thanjavur), 2 esteemed universities in TamilNadu, India. Students from different colleges across TamilNadu participated in the techfest and what I witnessed there was a well-organized gathering of extremely vibrant, energetic student community with a strong apetite to learn new things.

It was a whole day event organized into 3 hours of theory session + 3 hours of Lab, in each of these techfests. I wish it could have been an open-to-all workshop but I have to blame the lab capacity that enforced constraints on the organizers to limit the participation. Nevertheless, the way these workshops were organized was remarkably good and I should thank the student organizers who went out of their way to make this happen.

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Attending the theory session is the most boring part in the college and I used to fall asleep sometimes, while I was in the college. So we wanted to do this differently at the techfests and so we prepared about 30 cool demos to be shown as we proceed through explaining different areas. This trick worked indeed. We kept the students on their toes through these demos and the expectations about the subsequent demos were going up after showing each demo. Overall, the theory session came out much more productive for us and informative and interesting for students.

In the post lunch session, we wanted to gauge how did the theory session go. So we asked some leading questions on different FX features covered in the pre-lunch session and students were throwing-in the answers before we could complete the questions. We initially announced some goodies for people who answer these questions but we had to close down the Q&A session quickly since the response were overwhelming and we were running short of goodies.

Typically Students love the lab sessions since they get to try things hands-on and that was the case in techfest too. All the necessary softwares and exercise materials were pre-loaded on every machine in the lab and we did not even waste a minute on setting things up, thanks to the student organizers again !! We started off the lab sessions with pre-defined exercises specially designed for newbies to get started with JavaFX and students were provided with the JavaFX SDK and Netbeans 6.5. We actually thought we could relax a bit here but lab sessions ended up much more tiring than the theory sessions since we were bombarded with lot of questions. We kept running around all over the lab answering queries as We guided them through the exercises step-by-step. Finally, to our surprise, students completed the exercises 30 min ahead of the schedule and that demonstrated the ease-of-use of JavaFX Script and APIs. Remember these were folks who had no prior knowledge of NetBeans, most of them did not know Java or at the most knew very little Java and most of them had only heard about JavaFX till they signed up for the session!!

So as to make good use of the last 30 mins, we floated a small contest to encourage students to unleash their creativity and come up with their own application. Students never looked tired and took the challenge seriously. This time, they had no limits compared to the lab exercises and they were trying all sorts of things from pasting their photographs on the background to creating advanced effects such as reflection, ripple effects and animating objects all over the screen. At the end of the contest, we were fascinated to see some really cool apps and games coming out of it and it was challenging to pick the winner. At this point, We did realize in realtime the power and potential of JavaFX in faciliating rapid development of rich applications and how powerful the technology could be when we make it simple and easy-to-use.

I would like to appreciate and thank these students for taking up the workshop with lot of excitement, energy and passion and this definitely encourages me to reach more universities and colleges for conducting similar workshops.

Overall, It was a tiring but very rewarding 2 days and I wish I get more energy to cope with these guys.